APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION. I didn't post at all yesterday, partly because the violence in Iraq and Saudi Arabia dispirited me. 68 dead in Basra, four dead in Riyadh, hundreds wounded... it really put me off my feed.

Such atrocities seem to have the opposite effect on Mark Steyn, currently represented by a column called "Mideast Instability? Bring It On":

... The fetishization of stability was a big part of the problem. Falling for the Moussa line would give us another 25 years of the ayatollahs... Washington apparently reached the same conclusion -- that anything was better than the status quo. Or, as Thomas Friedman put it in The New York Times this weekend, "President Bush has stepped in and thrown the whole frozen Middle East chessboard up in the air"...

...If all else fails, then a modified Sam Goldwyn philosophy will do: I'm sick of the old despots, bring me some new despots...

...In Iraq, Libya, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere, the old Middle East is dying, and what replaces it can only be better.

I try to downplay the personal/political axis that animates so much of our discourse these days, but maybe there is a tempermental difference between liberals and conservatives.